10.30.2012

gmo's (genetically modified
organisms) and gmo foods have made quite a stir lately. in the news, california's proposition 37, if passed next week,
will require all vendors of food made with gmo ingredients to label them. even
though almost every other first-world country requires labeling of gmo foods of gmo foods, it
is not currently required in any state in the united states.

genetically modified foods are
edible organisms that have had their dna spliced with the genetic code from
another organism. they arrived on the scene in the us around 1996, and they
really took off. after fifteen years with no gmo labels on our foods, though,
many grass-roots groups are advocating for all that to change. so why the big
fuss now?

the fuss

gmo foods in the us are limited to a
list of just a few species, but pervasive ones. according to the institute for responsible technology,
"currently commercialized gm crops in the u.s. include soy (94%), cotton
(90%), canola (90%), sugar beets (95%), corn (88%), hawaiian papaya (more than
50%), zucchini and yellow squash (over 24,000 acres)."

in the united states, corn, soybeans
and canola are some of the major building blocks from which food scientists
construct many processed foods. in fact, the center for food safety says
gmo's make up about 70% of processed foods sold in the us (source). it's sometimes hard to document exactly
which ones they are, though, because they're not labeled.

the current legal gmo's haven't been
genetically modified to produce higher yields, better nutrition or even drought
resistance. according to the non-gmo project, "virtually
all commercial gmo's are engineered to withstand direct application of herbicide
and/or to produce an insecticide."

the existence of herbicide-resistant
crops means that farmers can spray weed killer directly on the food and still
have a harvest to yield; and that's exactly what our friends at the monsanto
corporation have been doing for over a decade (see monsanto's description of round up-ready crops).

rats

ingesting round up on a regular
basis sounds to the untrained ear like a recipe for disaster; and
there's some evidence that it is. thirty peer-reviewed animal studies found that
gmo foods caused problems in the liver, kidneys and blood, along with the
development of abnormal immune responses and reproductive abnormalities in the
animals that ate them.

more importantly, a lifetime study on rats released last month in
the peer-reviewed journal food and toxicology suggested a new side
effect of gmo foods - cancer. the rats that consumed gmo foods from the
monsanto corporation along with the herbicide normally sprayed on them (round
up) developed large tumors in various places in their bodies.

gmo studies like the ones mentioned
above are very controversial. the usda considers a lengthening list of
genetically modified foods to be safe for consumption. the companies that
develop the crops consider them great for profit margins. more than that, there
aren't any long-term studies that specifically focus on the physiological
reaction or human beings to gmo's. could 70% of our processed food really be
cancer-causing without us knowing about it?

guinea pigs

rats develop must faster than
humans, and gmo's have not been around long enough for us to see the lifetime
effects on human beings... yet. true, as many scientists and chemical company
representatives have pointed out, much of the most conclusive evidence linking
gmo's to cancer comes from just one study. and yet, this one study is the
only peer-reviewed study that has run long enough to test if gmo's and their
complimentary herbicides (like round up) cause cancer when ingested. time, and
many, many more studies will have to tell if the results have will be
duplicated.

for the moment, however, we are
right in the middle of a lab experiment of our own. the american food system is
so inundated with genetically modified foods that it has become taboo to label
them. we, the uninformed consumers, are the test group; the control will be
certain western european countries that won't touch the stuff. and in fifty
years...

more conclusive studies need to be
done before we can say whether gmo foods are safe for human consumption. in the
meantime, however, you may be interested in escaping the grand-scale
experimentation at play, there are ways to diminish the genetically modified
foods in your diet.

here's what you can do

want to avoid getting cancer from
the food you eat? though gmo foods are un-labeled in the store, you can get get
a pretty good idea of what is and isn't gmo if you follow the following
guidelines:

go to the farmers' market!
here's a great chance to talk with the farmer who grew your food. ask him
or her how they feel about gmo's, and find out if they use gmo seed or
animal feed. there's an online list of 120 oregon farmers markets here.

buy organic at the supermarket.
if the food you're buying has a usda organic label, it is legally required
to have 95% organic ingredients. you can find more info on the national organic program website. while gmo's
officially cannot be marketed as usda organic, there is no system in place
to test for gmo contamination in already certified foods.

do a little readingmany
companies in need of a little marketing boost have voluntarily paid for a
certification process to ensure their foods are gmo-free. the
non-gmo project has a list of gmo-free products here. you can also check out the center
for food safety'snon-gmo shopper's guide.

10.24.2012

the last time i mentioned one of my freight-hopping trips, i left off about the part where michael and i were huddling down in the moonlit sprawl of a freight car full of scrap metal. this was kinda cool and all, but we were starting to get somewhat discouraged by the realization that this train wasn't moving.
﻿

i stole this picture from the internets in case
anyone was having a hard time
imagining a scrap metal train car.

as discouraged as we were with not-moving trains, somewhere in the future michael and i would have trouble with trains that moved too much.﻿ on this night, however, we decided to make the critical decision of hopping on the next moving train we saw (more or less). this looks a lot easier and a lot less terrifying than it is.

we stayed outta sight. the engineer came through at the beginning of the train. these guys have radios and can communicate to a variety of anti-freight-hopping sources. engineers, however tend to be nice. maybe we should have...

avoided the bulls. being an amateur, i mostly focused my bull-avoiding energy on being paranoid that this would happen to me. there are plenty of sites online wherein "expert" hoppers give you all kinds of advice. i had not read any of those sites. we definitely put some effort into...

staying loose. it took a couple of different tries to get a train that was going out of the yard. once we did, however, we discovered that one of the engines (called "units" in the train hoppers dictionary) was unlocked. i guess this is standard procedure for one of the two major freight train corporations in the u.s.

in the unit, we found a chair with dashboard controls, a small bathroom, a mini fridge, and a case of water. we were on our way in style... but where?

we slept on the floor, sleeping bags rolled out beneath us. peering out at times at the darkened lanscape hastening by us. where is all this going? my caffeine-deprived brain barely managed the question as i drifted into a restless sleep.

10.22.2012

do you feel like your vote doesn’t count? me too! the
more i have studied history and examined current events, the more i have
been convicted that something is wrong with the structure of politics in the states.

the way i look at it, the option to vote for the “lesser of
two evils” doesn’t constitute much of a choice. the current state of affairs
locks political contenders in to receiving financial support from large,
non-local banks and corporations, which then have leverage over them once they
are elected. we need candidates, both locally and nationally, who aren’t forced
to raise extremely large sums of money just to make it into office.

this is why i want you to consider voting for corvallis citymeasure 02-81. the measure is an advisory to the city council – one that
communicates an important truth both clearly and concisely. we, the citizens of
corvallis, don’t agree with the u.s. supreme court’s finding that corporations
should have the same rights as individual people; and we want to amend the us
constitution to reflect this.

i realize that, just because the citizens of corvallis may
vote in favor of this measure in a few weeks, a constitutional amendment won’t
form overnight. many cities around the country have already taken similar steps
toward ending “corporate personhood” and making individual votes count once
again. now it’s corvallis’ turn. let’s move toward freeing up our
representatives to focus on serving us, their constituents, and making them
less accountable to the highest bidder.

10.08.2012

i found out today that i'll be moving to downtown a little later in the month. this is a dream come true for me. i have wanted for a long time to live right at the center of a city and take long walks day and night.

it would be a little cliche to say that i haven't updated this blog because i've been so busy. many, many blogs and websites have scattered and apologetic entries form months ago topping their pages - just hundreds of thousands, if not millions of abandoned slices of an infinite(!?) cyberspace.

the truth is that i haven't updated this blog because, lately, i have been a voracious velociraptor with literally hundreds of things on each day's to-do list. here's a little taste of what that's like:

commuting...

...swim practice...

...suppress democracy...

...turning off alarm clock...

...spice bun...

...much too busy to blog.

well, at least now you know what i've been up to. man, i should have live-tweeted at least half of it. what about you? ant comparable adventures?